Richard Cobden Quotes

This quotation illustrated the extreme polarization between the current fundamentalist Muslims, and the Muslim modernists and the West. Kamal Ataturk, the great leader and stateman who is the father of modern Turkey, is castigated by the author for leading the new Turkish parliament to depose the Caliph – the civil and religious autocrat, one of whom reigned from after the death of Muhammad till his abolishment in 1924. Most of the rest of the world credits Ataturk with being one of the great leaders of all time—one who led a democratic revolution which transformed Turkey into the only Muslim secular democracy, requiring pubic secular European type education for all children, giving women the right to vote (before the U. S. even), adopting a European alphabet and dress, and outlook on life—creating most remarkably a total cultural revolution with virtually no loss of life. No revolutionary leader, before or since has led so extensive a political and cultural revolution, and it was a bloodless revolution. Turkey, into the 21st century, was by far the most powerful, industrialized, scientific and modern nation of Muslims in the world and others were far behind. Yet many Islamic theologian still castigate Atatork for his great achievements as being against the will of God.

Turkey under the Ottomans had been an imperialist, expansionist, empire, fighting and ruling over half of Europe and all of the Middle East. Ataturk argued that fighting and taking casualties should only take place to protect the nation’s independence and not to build or maintain an empire.

At the time, Muslim clerics had a great deal of influence and in many cases legal control over all facets of Turkish society much as exists in other Islamic societies today. They even controlled what was taught in the schools. Remarkably, without bloodshed, Ataturk broke both the power and the influence of the clerics on all official and public activities. Many Turkish Muslims even developed a type of reformed Islam with the relationship between the individual and the clerics one of parity much like Protestant churches in the West. At the same time there was a more orthodox part of the population and while they sent their children to religious schools, they also attended public schools so even the orthodox Muslims in Turkey learned science and modern subjects which are still not taught in most Islamic schools and madrassas.

In 1925 his administration had passed a law banning the wearing of the traditional Muslim hat. See {593676} for his reasoning.

This was an incredible prediction with no other world leader thinking it possible for decades until that is exactly what happened.

The Ottoman Turks had just conquered the city of Constantinople including the Eastern Roman Empire in their domain. They would be the dominant power in the area until the First World War when they made the mistake of siding with the Germans and the Ottoman Empire was broken up in the Treaty of Versailles.

Greece had always coveted Anatolia which was a part of the Ottoman Empire but had been in antiquity a Greek dominated area. Further, people of Greek ethnicity and culture, who hundreds of years ago use to be the vast majority were after the hundreds of years of Ottoman rule and migration were then the largest minority in Anatolia. After the Turks lost the First World War as a consequence of their allying with Germany, and had been stripped of its Arab territories and was determined to keep the territories that they still had. Also, Turkey had just undergone a revolution and the old order was displaced. Venizelos and the Greeks saw this as an opportunity to get back Anatolia and sent a military invasion force to land at Smyrna (Ismir to the Turks), the largest city of Anatolia where despite the Greek minority in all of Anatolia, Greeks were a small majority in Smyrna and many of the ethnic Greeks not only aided the Greeks once they had landed but participated in atrocities against the minority of Turkish Muslims of Smyrna. The Ambassador was then trying to rationalize the heavy hand with which the Turks dealt with the indigenous Greeks many of whom were guilty and many of whom were not.

A few months later, that is exactly what Germany did. She was hoping that England would not enter the war despite her treaty obligations, but she was willing to risk the possibility. The Czar had a strong espionage and intelligence service active in Germany, but, like so many other intelligence failures, the intelligence operatives and analysts had military and economic facts but had little understanding of the German culture which propelled Germany to what to most other cultures was “irrational policy making.” People and nations often engage in irrational activities, even against their own self-interest.

This is one of the reasons that Europe had many security problems during that period. Some of the countries had very poor intelligence services. Even the ones that did have quality intelligence, tended to avoid sharing intelligence with their neighbors.